Kent County Council is emulating the comms agency model as part of a major shake-up of its PR team.

The council's external comms team is now structured on an account manager model, in which its staff are allocated specific parts of the council in the same way as account managers would be allocated clients.

Each directorate of the council, such as education, learning and skills, is matched to one member of the team.

Marcus Chrysostomou, head of external comms, told PRWeek the intention was to involve comms thinking at the start of any work within departments.

'Often with the more traditional press office set-up you see in councils, comms will not be advising at the beginning of a process, but at the end, when most of the work is done,' he said.

Chrysostomou asserted that councils needed to look beyond current public sector models.

He added: 'My experience of working in local government is that you tend to be quite reactive, whereas this allows planning to be done alongside directorates over the course of a year.'

Two years ago, the council halved its comms team of 100. It has since added a number of new posts following a second review last year.